April 21, 2012 – Seattle, Washington – Around Noon PDT

Description: I came across your website while surfing Google last night and was about to give up trying to find out what this object was but thought I would send over to you in case you had any idea of what you think it might be?

I reported this to some UFO groups, but the only thing that happened was that it raised a lot of doubts and someone made a short video out of the original footage and photo I sent here (I had asked to be anonymous on those to keep attention away from my 8 year old grand daughter who accidently captured the photo last April 21, 2012.)

I received a response from one investigator that the photo was interesting, but received no response to several more emails asking why there was no further investigation.

WE want to know is what it is, nothing else. So any insight or feedback is greatly appreciated.

Here’s the story: My daughter’s family was headed down I-5 southbound on their way here for my birthday party.

My grand daughter has a Nintendo 3DS camera game system that she flips between video mode and photo mode and like me as a broadcaster I suppose loves to make little documentaries when they are driving along. So she was shooting footage of the sky as she normally does and then they came to a rolling slow down at about the 80th St. exit which is near Wallingford in Seattle. She signed off on the video, put the camera in photo mode and snapped ONE shot of the sky. She had no idea what she had captured and they continued on their way to our house for the birthday party. Later that night before they went home she had her camera going through her files and came to me and said “grandpa what is that?” I looked and said “it looks like a spaceship.”

As someone who has spent much of my life in media and high technology and now Internet media I immediately chuckled because I thought it was a game insert because after all this is a Nintendo device. But being the geek I am I took a picture of her phone with my iPhone and left it at that. Then I slept on it for a while and thought that was weird. So I drove up to North Seattle (we live on the South Sound) and took her camera back home.

Here’s where this story gets interesting. My best friend is a professor of quantum physics at Yale and an expert in dark energy (no kidding) and he was in town that week. So I thought I would take the opportunity to have him take her camera apart and get his feedback. He came over and did so and I also called Nintendo and sent them the photo. The support guy at Nintendo told me that their device has no way of creating an object like that and that it was definitely some “thing” that was photographed. He was apparently also a geek and continued “what’s the pink glow around it?” I said I have no idea. He said “that looks like infrared.”

So I ran that by my friend and he said that it might be a drone that was made out of a special Plexiglas that somehow scatters the infrared spectrum in order to cloak it. That piqued by interest and I started researching invisibility technology since then and have found a mountain of evidence that it not only exists, but has been around for a while. I still have no idea if it is a drone or ET or something. I am totally clueless but incredibly curious. So I am still seeking answers.

Anyway, I also have a friend who is a satellite image analyst in Nevada that I shot the photo over too and they ran some various tests on it to see if the file was altered with a virus, hoax or game hack somehow in the camera. The fact that it’s SO clear and centered in the frame it is hard to believe so my immediate instinct was to check that stuff. I even offended my son in law asking if he was pulling a joke. But after looking at the files, dates, times and now even the meta-data (I have a geek friend looking into that now) we’re pretty sure it is an actual photo. This is true nnless my 8 year old grand daughter is a genius that could photo shot an image, re-synthesize the image into her Nintendo game format and insert it back into the camera in the exact time and date sequence in 30 minutes in the car on the way over here.

I’m attaching the photo file out of the camera for you to take a look at (HNI 0097) and the picture I took of her camera with my iPhone and the blow up I made on my PC so I could see the pink haze around it the Nintendo guy noticed. I will be happy to share the complete video footage leading up to the slowdown if that helps. Here’s the video someone made from what I sent to MUFON last November:

Around that time I also saw a report about some weird objects spotted in Denver and reached out to the TV station and the photo was used as a part of the story of fast moving objects over Denver.

I was trying to determine what those were as well because if they’re NOT bugs or some camera anomalies then perhaps what my grand daughter caught was something moving at extreme speeds. The reason I think it was cloaked is because it was a rolling slowdown in both lanes on I-5, she didn’t see and neither did anyone else that we are aware of that day. One “friend” on Facebook told me it looked like a Devo hat someone threw over the freeway wall. We drove up there and there are no street lights or anything else behind that freeway wall but a sleepy neighborhood.

Note (My response to the witness follows):

Thanks for sending your grand daughter’s photo to me. It sounds like that you already done your homework in seeking out professional opinions.

I ran the photo through a couple of programs that I use to analyze photos. The photo appears to be the original as output from the camera. Unfortunately the Nintendo camera didn’t reveal some key settings like F-Stop, Shutter speed, focal length, etc. Your argument is strong that your grand daughter wouldn’t have “doctored” the photo. There is no evidence of that.

I don’t believe that the object is a drone. Drones are not common in controlled airspace. The area where the photo was taken would have been in “Class B” airspace. Some law enforcement agencies (state and federal) use drones. However, I never seen any drones of the shape in the photo. I subscribe to Aviation Week & Space Technology and they have updates on the latest drone technology. Also the FAA has been tasked with coming up with a plan to allow drones in controlled airspace. The deadline for the FAA to come up with a plan is sometime in 2015.

The object appears to be in good focus so I don’t think that it was moving fast.

A few possibilities:

1. The shape of the object is similar to the shape of the camera aperture. Some photos (more often at night) reveal diamond shaped lights that are really due to the aperture clipping something bright and large (like the moon). However, even if the camera clipped something what would it have clipped?

2. Photos taken into the Sun can result in dark spots. However, I have never seen these spots in the shape of the object in the photo.

3. Some sort of flotation device.

4. Many cameras can capture images in the near infrared. Perhaps that may have been the reason why the object wasn’t seen.

5. I receive many photos where people find objects in the background of photos that were not seen.

It would be good to know the time of the photo. The metadata says right after midnight which means that the clock on the camera was not set right. (Perhaps it was off 12 hours.)

Given what I know about the photo I don’t have an explanation for the photo. It looks like the “classic flying saucer.”

I would like to see the video. I can slow up frames and do some other enhancements.

I don’t claim to be an expert on cameras and videos, but I have looked at a lot of UFO photos in the past 10 years. This one is interesting.

2 Responses to April 21, 2012 – Seattle, Washington – Around Noon PDT

One issue I see that needs to be explained is the direction of the light from the sun. The absence of long shadows on the ground support the claim that the video was shot sometime around noon. What is also evident, based on the way the light hits several of the objects in the scene, light poles, sides of buildings, etc., is that the position of the sun is positioned to the left of center as we look at the video. The left side of objects are lighted, the right side of objects are shaded. But if you look at the “UFO”, it’s just the opposite. The right side is lighted and the left side is shaded.

Another thing I wondered about is the pink glow around the object. The glow seems to trace the contour of the object as if the object is a 2-dimensional image. For example, in Photoshop there is an effect called “Outer Glow”. One can select an object in a photo, for example, copy the object, paste it directly over the original, and apply the “Outer Glow” to the pasted object. The glow (any color you choose) then appears exactly the way the glow appears in this still shot allegedly from the video. The photoshop “glow” will take on the same contour as the object. The photoshop object, of course, is 2-D, not 3-D. If the object was 3-D then the glow would surround the entire object (i.e., front, back and sides). In other words if this object in the video frame was a real 3-dimensional object in the sky, the glow would not just be seen as tracing the edges of the contour. On the contrary, the object would appear as if it were entirely engulfed in the haze of the “glow”. Instead, what we see here is a clear, unobstructed view of the object with a “glow” only showing around the outer edge of the contour.